A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “You know nothing about it,” she snapped through chattering teeth. “You only know what you want. What you think. But this is about Ry—”

  “I know everything about it,” he clipped harshly. “A boy needs to know his father. His real father. Good, bad, or indifferent. He needs to know—”

  “That he’s loved,” she cried. “That he comes first. The only thing that comes first with you is your precious career. Sawyer, why can’t you just let this be? You know the truth. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “Until my son knows the truth, it’ll never be enough.” He realized he was rubbing the pain in his chest, and deliberately pushed his hand instead into his pocket.

  “You’re being unreasonable,” she accused. “And totally selfish—”

  “Me! You’ve had him for nine years. Pretended he was another man’s for a good portion of that.”

  “I pretended nothing.” Her nose was blue with cold. “Tom knew everything. He loved us anyway.”

  “Hell, he was just a real saint, wasn’t he? Just a real upstanding guy.”

  “Say what you want, Sawyer. It won’t change the facts. Tom and Ryan and I were a family, no matter what you want to believe. Ryan will always remember Tom as his father.”

  “And if Tom hadn’t died?”

  She looked away.

  “You’d have just kept on living a lie,” he guessed roughly. “And one day the truth, somehow, someway, would have come out. And Ryan’s whole existence would be ripped from beneath him. That’s being real unselfish, Rebecca. Not only has he lost Tom, he’d think I’d never wanted him.”

  “Ryan would know that Tom loved him. That’s what matters. That’s what he would remember. What he’d know. Tom wanted him. Tom loved him.”

  “And you never gave me a chance to love him! The truth matters too. Make no mistake, it matters a helluva lot more than you’re willing to admit.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I know.” Pushed beyond endurance, he caught her arms and pulled her up to his nose. “I know because it is exactly what happened to me.”

  Her lovely eyes blinked in confusion. “What?”

  His gaze lowered to her lips. He swallowed and let her loose, turning away. Rubbed the sharp ache in his chest again. “I was seventeen when I learned that Squire Clay isn’t my real father.”

  Rebecca stared at Sawyer’s back, unable to contain a gasp of shock. “But of course you’re Squire’s son,” she said after a moment. “You’re so much like him it’s uncanny.”

  He grunted. “Yeah, well, I guess it goes to prove that environment has a lot to do with some traits.”

  Some note in his voice stayed afloat in the wave of panic and pain and...and yearning that she’d been drowning in since she’d opened her kitchen door to find him standing outside. She’d sensed he was there before she’d even opened the door. Had known, too, before she’d seen his expression that he’d realized the truth about Ryan.

  That note in his voice, though—resignation colored with fruitless wishes and unanswered prayers—broke over her when nothing else possibly could. She walked around him, unreasonably saddened to see the lines etched in his stark face. The hand that he probably didn’t even know he was rubbing over his heart.

  And despite everything—the past, the present, the future—she wanted to soothe him. No, not just wanted. Needed “Tell me.”

  She expected him to refuse. Expected him to brush it all off and return to the most basic of his demands. To see her son and claim him as his own.

  But he didn’t. And Rebecca had to admit that she didn’t know Sawyer as well as she’d been telling herself all these years. Because he did tell. And her heart broke all over again.

  Only this time it wasn’t because of him.

  It was for him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the end, they came to an agreement of sorts. He wouldn’t tell Ryan the truth right now. And she’d allow Sawyer to spend as much time as he wanted with her son. Their son.

  Now that he’d told her his own history, she understood his unrelenting inflexibility a little better. But she knew that sooner or later Sawyer would insist on Ryan knowing. No matter how much she wanted to deny it, she knew that he wasn’t being unfair.

  She didn’t understand, though, why Sawyer hadn’t discussed his long-ago discovery about Squire. Ever. She’d asked, but his answer had contained only the holdover logic of an angry, hurt seventeen-year-old boy. And as the years had passed, he’d become less and less interested in delving into the issue. If it hadn’t been for his accident and the resulting injuries that had brought him back to Wyoming, back into Rebecca’s life—which he’d promptly turned topsy-turvy—he still wouldn’t have given it half a thought.

  She wasn’t sure she believed him on that score. But she knew she had no leg for argument, considering that her move to Wyoming had occurred only after Tom’s death.

  Dropping her head back against the chair, she sighed and closed the photo album she’d been paging through. Baby pictures of Ryan. The album containing the informal snapshots from her wedding day sat on the floor beside the chair.

  Let go of the past. Accept the past.

  Both things had been recommended by people who loved her. Tom. Delaney. She’d even told herself the same things at one time or another. So why couldn’t she do either one?

  Because she didn’t want to let go.

  Rebecca slowly leaned over and picked up the photo album with the wedding snapshots. Her heart ached a little that she had to look at the photos to truly remind herself what Tom had looked like. The tall, nearly gangly, man he’d been, with a shock of auburn hair and gentle brown eyes. He’d been good and kind and sweet and supportive. Incredibly gifted in his field. She’d come to love him and missed him still.

  But then, he’d never taken her from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell, either.

  Rebecca carefully adjusted a photo that was a little bit crooked. She hadn’t wanted the heights and depths. She’d wanted stability. Security. A man who was there, when he said he’d be there. A man who put her and her son first; even before his precious career.

  But did he really put you first? The question that Delaney had pointedly asked the last time they’d spoken popped impertinently into Rebecca’s mind.

  How many times had Tom had to adjust their evening plans because his surgical skills were needed in some emergency?

  Rebecca drew in a shaky breath. Tom had saved lives.

  Sawyer had done the same. They’d just had different means of doing so.

  Tom had been as committed to his career as Sawyer. Except that Tom had embraced the future. He’d wanted a wife. A son. More children if they’d only been lucky enough to conceive one together.

  Whereas Sawyer had most definitely not wanted those things.

  What was it with a world that was so topsy-turvy? A man who wanted the future, only to be ripped painfully from their lives. And a man who didn’t want the future, to be dumped so thoroughly into their existence.

  She was no closer to finding an answer to that than she’d ever been. Also no closer to knowing anymore why she’d ever moved to Weaver in the first place.

  Surely she hadn’t moved to Weaver to resolve the past. Or had she?

  Life is too short.

  The words whispered through her mind. She’d said them to Squire Clay at the dance. He’d told her to remember them.

  They’d been the last words Tom had spoken to her before he died. She could pretend that he’d been speaking personally. But doing so would dishonor his memory in ways he didn’t deserve.

  He’d been telling her to do what was right. To let Ryan know that he still had a father, despite Tom’s fate. To live, because life, m the end, was simply too short to waste.

  The buzz of the telephone jerked her out of her solemn thoughts. She closed the pages of the wedding-album and went over to answer it.

  Ryan wanted to spend the rest of the day with the Fielding
s, who were driving into Gillette to finish their last-minute Christmas shopping.

  Knowing she was the biggest coward on the planet, Rebecca agreed.

  When she’d hung up, she turned away from the phone. Her attention snagged by the gaily decorated Christmas tree in the comer—the dozens of ornaments that Ryan had made in school projects over the years, and the few bulbs that she and Tom had collected during their marriage.

  Both mingled together on a tree selected by another male—the one man who had been the instigating reason for either one of the other two being in her life at all.

  Life was too short.

  Rebecca slowly gathered up the photo albums that chronicled Ryan’s infanthood through his recent school activities. She pulled her coat on over her shoulders and with her arms filled with the leather-bound albums, walked down to the end unit. After their confroniation, she’d been aware of the sheriff s car coming by. A few hours later, when she’d been hovering in her office, making a mishmash of a supply order, she’d seen Bobby Ray drop off Sawyer in front of his room. So she knew he was back.

  When Sawyer answered her knock, she held the albums out for him. “If there are any photos you want to keep,” she said through a throat raw with emotion, “add them to that bottom album there. You can keep it.”

  He took the books, his hands brushing against hers, making her chest ache even more. “What if I decide I want them all?”

  She swallowed. “Then I guess you can have them all,” she whispered.

  His blue gaze darkened. “Why?”

  She swallowed again. Still the lump in her throat wouldn’t budge. Tucking her hands in the pockets of her coat, she controlled the urge to look away from his intent gaze. “I’m trying to do what’s right,” she said finally.

  “And giving me carte blanche with your photo albums is what’s right?”

  It sounded almost silly, put that way. “I can’t give you those years,” she said. “But I can give you a piece of them with those photos.”

  “And does that clear your conscience?”

  Rebecca winced. “It’s not like that.” He turned inside for a moment, setting the albums on the round table underneath the window. She realized her chance for escape was gone when he turned to her in half a second and pulled her inside the comfortably warm room.

  “Then tell me what it is like,” he suggested in a low voice. “Tell me how you expect me to respond, here. Is this an olive branch you’re extending? A sign of the truce we’ve more or less reached? A tidbit to placate me? Keep me happy enough that I’ll hold off just a little longer on forcing the issue with Ryan?”

  Rebecca looked away, not answering. She had no words. The albums sat on the table, covering part of the microcassette she’d given him. The cassette had been split in two, little curls of narrow brown audiotape swirling over the table.

  “I listened to it,” he said, obviously following her gaze. “I borrowed a player from Bobby Ray.”

  “Sawyer, don’t.”

  “‘Becky Lee, you’ve gotta stop calling,”’ he quoted his ten-year-old message back to her. “We had a good time, but now it’s over. Time to move on. My team needs me and...well, Bec, you just gotta stop calling.”

  She felt ill. Physically ill, because she realized at that moment that saying the words now hurt him as much as they’d ever hurt her.

  She wanted to turn and run. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold him. Kiss away the lines of strain around his dark blue eyes and let his touch make her forget the past that would forever stand between them. Make her forget that there was still no future for them.

  All she did, though, was sink weakly down to the nearest surface. The foot of his neatly made bed. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long that you don’t still hate me for it.”

  Staring at her fingers twisting together on her lap, Rebecca shook her head slightly. “I already told you that I don’t hate you, Sawyer. I just—just don’t want Ryan hurt.”

  “This isn’t all about Ryan, Doc. You know it as well as I do. If it was, you wouldn’t be sitting there looking like your insides are knotting, and I wouldn’t be standing here needing to bury myself in you like I need blood in my veins.”

  Her gaze flew from her hands to his face.

  “You just can’t come into a man’s room and sit on his bed without inspiring thoughts, Doc.”

  She bounced up from the foot of the bed as if she’d developed springs in her rear. “I didn’t come here for this.”

  “What did you come for?”

  “To give you the albums. To try to solve—”

  “We can’t solve the past, Bec. It’s done. Right or wrong. Ryan is our son and you kept that truth from me, right or wrong, because of things I’d said. Things I’d done. We can’t solve that. Can’t settle it. It just is. Just like it just is that I can’t be in a room without wanting you, and that—sweetness—doesn’t have a damned thing to do with the past. It...just...is.”

  It always would be.

  The words weren’t spoken, but she shivered as if they had been.

  “Where is Ryan?”

  She touched a trembling hand to her throat. “I gave him permission to go to Gillette with the Fieldings.”

  “Trying to keep him away from me?”

  Annoyance trickled through her. “I said I wouldn’t keep you from seeing him whenever you wanted.”

  “Just not today.”

  “I’m not ready to tackle this with Ryan yet. Are you?” She spread her hands. “For heaven’s sake, Sawyer, you and I cannot even get through a conversation with each other. So, yes, when I was presented with a reprieve for today, I took the easy way out. Shoot me. In the meantime, I know he’s having a ball with the Fieldings.”

  “There’s only a few days until Christmas.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You and Ryan will come with me to the big house tomorrow evening. They’re planning a big old meal and stuff for Christmas Eve.”

  Panic spiraled through her. “But you said you wouldn’t blurt the news right away.”

  “It’s Christmas,” he said inflexibly. “We’ll be there. Like a family, whether we admit it aloud or not.”

  “I see the captain is alive and well.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that you’re awfully full of orders, here. What if Ryan and I already have plans for tomorrow?”

  “Do you?”

  “That’s not the point.” Frustration made her voice rise and she pressed her lips together, grappling for composure. “I’m not going to just barge in on a family celebration,” she explained more calmly.

  “Ryan is family. You’d make life a lot easier for us all if you’d start accepting that.”

  “I accepted that ten years ago when I had a positive pregnancy test and you were halfway around the world, refusing to accept my call.” Rebecca rose, tugging the lapels of her coat together. “And I’ve spent every day since trying to provide a stable life for Ryan, because I didn’t want him to ever know that his natural father didn’t want him.”

  “I didn’t know about him,” Sawyer said tightly. “I’m sorry. I was the selfish, self-absorbed bastard you remember. If I had known, things would have been different.”

  “How?” Rebecca poked her finger into his unyielding chest. “How? Would you have requested assignments that kept you in this country? In this hemisphere? Would you have been around to go to my childbirth classes? To be there in the delivery room when Ryan was born? Or when he was three and already learning to read, confounding his preschool teachers with his mind, his precocity? Or when he was only six and smaller than most of his classmates, determined to prove that he could keep up with them and broke his collarbone playing sports with boys twice his size?”

  Sawyer was so still, his words so soft. “I suppose Tom was there for all that. You sure didn’t waste any time finding a substitute father for my son, did you?”

  “Yes, T
om was there. He never let us down. He loved Ryan.”

  “And you.”

  She lifted her chin, instinctively backing away from the waves of tension radiating from his still body. “And me.”

  “Did he love you well, Rebecca? Move you? Make you tremble? Make you—” his head tilted, his eyes blue flame “—burn? Make a baby with you?”

  She bumped the edge of the bed, wobbled, but held her ground. “I’m not going to discuss this with you.”

  “I haven’t been a saint,” he murmured. “Ten years is a long time. There have been women.”

  “I’m sure there were.”

  Sawyer nearly smiled at her tart retort. Only he couldn’t find one humorous thing about this situation. “None of them were you,” he admitted, as he watched the pupils of her eyes dilate, then disappear beneath the protective layer of lowered lids and long, soft lashes. “None of them made me think about changing my existence... my life.”

  “Oh, please—”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Doc,” he warned. “Or you’ll suffer the consequences.”

  Her lashes flew up, her expression torn between wariness and challenge. “I’ll remind you, again, that I’m not under your command, Captain.”

  His senses heightened even more. He deliberately touched her jaw with his thumb; brushed across her lower lip, making her shift uneasily. “You were the one in my dreams. Sweet Becky Lee.” He watched her suck in her lower lip for the barest second. “The only one who made me feel things I was afraid to feel. Want things I’d spent a lifetime convincing myself I didn’t want.”

  “Sell it to the next girl. I’m not buying.”

  “Do you remember Rabbit?”

  “What?”

  “Rabbit Gonzales. My swim buddy.”

  “I—Yes, I remember him.”

  “He was married. Two kids.”

  “What does he have to do with—”

  “He died on that one op I had about a month before I went to Malaysia. Remember when I was gone for that week?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “He left his pretty wife a widow—his little kids without their daddy. Because he was a SEAL. Because he tried mixing two lives that didn’t mix. And I didn’t want to do that to you.”